Chapter 5882: Shinjitsu IV

While one body traded blows with Kir One across a region of THE Chrysalis, the other sat motionless on the cracked white throne at the bottom of THE Descent of Chains, and felt his Shinjitsu arrive.

It arrived instantly, because his existence was a single existence spread across every body he owned. A gold-blue film rose over his stellar skin, steady at 0.2%, and the throne beneath him woke.

Emotive sat at his side with her Egos hushed, watching the film spread through eyes that held every colour at once.

The litany began.

|"Tend the flow. Turn the cold. Weigh the debt. Walk the winter..."|

Noah had always taken it for background hum, a seat doing the work of a seat. Under his film it sounded different, because each verse was a hook, and the pale frost-light pouring up out of the throne into his existence was authority borrowed from a hand still hidden from him, set in place to turn whoever sat here into a function. A being fully absorbed by this seat would stop being a person and become a mechanism, and the throne, with perfect courtesy, was patiently beginning to do exactly that.

It was the finest borrowed robe in existence!

He observed it with the calm of a man examining a specimen, even as the specimen pulled at his chest, and he declined it!

Then he did more than decline. Lifthrasir’s Kirtimukha devoured Narratives, and a Narrative was only the weight a story gained by being believed, so if the throne’s authority rested on one, his Shinjitsu, which sorted the borrowed from the true, could take it apart and eat it too.

He let the litany run through him and read each verse down to its bottom with Noetic Infinity. Every verse was hollow at the keystone, with a vast and patient story hanging from every line, a winter where every cold had an owner and every owner had a price.

Then he reached through THE Dream That Was Always So and dreamed the throne as having always been his!

The pale frost-light fought him! Cold lanced through Body Two’s veins, the old cracks in the seat groaned, and the litany rose to a chant. Noah held his small true room at the center and kept pressing his truth into the stone, until blue-gold veins crept through the white along every crack like rivers filling a dry delta, and the whole throne glowed gold-blue. The authority drained out of it into him, and with it came a single thread of the story it hung from.

He swallowed it!

The seat that had always been cold beneath him turned warm.

"Oooh?" Emotive breathed, and all fourteen of her Egos went quiet together.

|A portion of the authority of THE Existential Epitropos has been broken down and integrated as your own.|

|The throne now carries your truth. Blue-gold veins run through its white.|

...!

|A thread of THE Narrative of THE Long Night has been consumed and integrated into your own.|

|Integrated: a sliver, too small to measure.|

...!

|Caution: A Narrative of this age outweighs everything you carry. Integrate only what your Shinjitsu can make wholly yours.|

|Caution: A Narrative consumed leaves a gap in the flow. ?????|

...!

Noah sat very still.

It had worked, and that settled something! A Narrative could be eaten, so THE Long Night was a Narrative, a vast story laid over an entire cycle of existence, and a story had an author or a hijacker.

Who could seize a whole cycle of existence and keep it turning while existence stayed blind to it?

He felt no fear, only a cold, bright interest as for now, clues pointed to THE Dissolved Progenitor.

The change in the seat rolled outward and reached his Kin.

|Your bonds with your Kin are rooted in what you are, and grow truer as you do.|

Across THE Nova Dream Sector, the five pillars shuddered! Each was a Dream Immensity that had always felt, to itself, like a construct shaped to a purpose, and each now felt a faint, strange grain at its center that belonged to nobody else.

|Ruination: your perfect record has begun to remember in a voice of its own, back when she was a mere Ruination Core.|

|THE Infiniverse: the realm stretched beneath the Sector has begun to feel like a home instead of a frame and remembers her life as a floating island in THE Beast World, and selectively ignores any history tracing back to THE Earliest Folds. Her chosen beginning in that floating Spiritual Land you claimed.|

|Ul’moreth: THE First Tongue has said something it meant. His hair has grown thicker as he thinks of The Ginnungagap|

|Emotive: Her Everythings have begun to feel for themselves.|

|Aurvald, THE Winged Winter That Dreams: the winter has begun to dream a winter of its own choosing.|

...!

|Each pillar now holds a nascent grain of verisimilitude.|

|Their Assimilation Rates remain too small to measure. They need to put in the work as Shinjitsu will never awaken in them just through you.|

...!

In the ruined Heart far above the throne, Aurvald spread its wings of gold-white ice and let them fall slowly, like a man breathing out after a long hold.

Noah’s awareness slid down through THE Infiniverse to THE Early Veiled Shore, where the third Emotive knelt among the cocoons.

She was pouring her regenerating Everythings into them in thin gold-blue streams, one for each sleeper: Amelia fishing with her granddaughter, Henry, Thalia, Barbatos...

At the scale he now lived, they were fragile vessels of carbon and memory and nascent Provenance, far below the smallest Ancient Immensity, and a single careless breath from the Fiend could have unmade every one of them.

And yet, through Shinjitsu, Noah saw what only a smaller scale could show.

They were the reason the boy in the small quiet room was real!

His bonds with Amelia, Henry, and Seo-yeon were unborrowed down to the last thread. They came from a life rather than a cosmic system, from night shifts and from the empty seat that had been kept set for him at every meal.

In the beginning, he had been a human with worries and anxieties, and in the end, he would still be human regardless how grand he grew.

So he anchored his True Dream around their sleeping heartbeats, Amelia’s slow, Henry’s strong, Seo-yeon’s quick, and let those three rhythms set the pulse for everyting he had built.

Across the whole Sector, the faint pressure that Existential Narrative Correction laid on every replaced particle went slack.

|THE Nova Dream Sector has anchored its primary truth in unborrowed human bonds. It is becoming...your Sandbox.|

Beneath the cocoon, Amelia’s heart beat on, slow and steady, and the largest thing Noah had ever built settled around it like a hand around a candle.

And her existence and the Existence of all others in his Dreams...only grew grander!